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This paper reports on a study that explores how artists might best support very young children's engagement in integrated arts performances. It aims to contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which artists work with very young children in performing arts spaces. The study was designed to intimately examine a work with and for a very young audience. Through a combination of reflective narrative and analytic discussion, this paper will demonstrate how a collective of teaching artists supported very young children's engagement by positioning them as co-constructors of artistic experience.

This article considers a pilot research project that examines the successes, failures, and best practice approaches for delivering online performing arts education experiences to young people around Australia. In conversation with 15 teaching artists and 18 youth-based arts organisations nationally, it evaluates the challenges and innovations in live online arts education experienced during the COVID-19 pivot. In doing so it examines pedagogies that foreground embodied and playful collaboration and diversified access for participants. It recognises the role of youth arts in reshaping creativity learning and opens considerations of the role digital educations may play in increased arts accessibility.

This paper investigates the preparation of Australian undergraduate university arts students for a life challenging arts-teaching and creative experience in Timor-Leste. It explores university teaching practice and how we may achieve better student experiences in preparation for their futures as teaching artists. This narrative inquiry research hears the voices of the students through their individual, personal stories. The emerging teaching artists articulate challenges, identify shifts in beliefs and values, and confirm skills that are transferable to cultural arts teaching contexts in the future. In all, the research has resulted in 46 recommendations, some minor, and some requiring more significant structural changes that affect course delivery. For the purposes of this paper, we reflect on and discuss three of the major findings and recommendations in the pedagogical, cultural, and artistic areas of the project implementation. As such, this paper represents a reflective analysis of some of the findings regarding curriculum design within this project.

Play is a universal human experience. Often regarded as the unique purview of children, an emerging body of research points to the importance of playfulness in adulthood. This article reports on the research and observations of two teaching artists working in Connected, a Sydney Theatre Company adult-literacy-through-drama programme. This article conceptualises the drama room as a liminal space. Through improvisational responses participants engage in a learning style that promotes playfulness, which subsequently generates a sense of pleasure and joy and, in doing so, has an intrinsic value beyond the specific language learning outcomes. In this article we build on Guitard et al.'s (2005) components of playfulness in adults: creativity, curiosity, pleasure, sense of humour and spontaneity, in order to posit our own ideas about the conditions necessary for encouraging the freedom to play in adult language learning contexts.

The historically male-dominated discourse encompassing artistic creativity has often failed to acknowledge the voices and contributions of women. Female artists continue to face barriers in terms of accessing opportunities, attaining positions of prominence, and earning potential, in comparison with their male counterparts. This inequality is deleterious to female artists and society. Therefore, it is important to understand the relationship between artistic creativity and gender, with a particular emphasis on elite female artistic exemplars. The present qualitative study utilized in-depth semi-structured interviews, in accordance with the methodology of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, to explore the role of gender in relation to artistic creativity among 10 eminent Australian female visual artists. Findings indicated that participants were affected detrimentally by gender-based inequality on personal, professional, and sociocultural levels. Their experiences as women, however, also inspired and informed their artistic creativity aesthetically and conceptually. The findings challenge patriarchal conceptualizations of the "male artistic genius" by presenting a female-focused counternarrative. Implications for educating, supporting, and empowering current and emerging female artists to excel are discussed.

Due to the recent increase in Australian students undertaking study abroad opportunities, an effect of a neoliberal society, there has been a plethora of literature in this area with the extant literature focusing on students' motivations and subsequent benefits of exchange. This paper examines how the capital acquired during intercultural experiences are performed by Australian exchange students. Interviewed before, during, and after Mexican sojourns, the students initially (re)produced a stylised pastiche of 'Mexico'. Made in urban Australia, this imaginary comprises Frida-Kahlo themed restaurants and Day-of-the-Dead exotica. As a result of geographic distance and limited migration from Mexico, Mexicanidad in Australia operates as a vacant conceptual category into which 'cool' yearnings can be inscribed. Despite problematising their pre-departure constructions at times, the students continued to employ this version of Mexicanidad in their performance of the role of Mexican expert, in Mexico and on their return. This article theorises the functions of such identity performances, proposing that exchange experiences, and the intercultural capital they acquire, serve as a method by which students can construct and perform transnational identities.

This article concerns itself with the potential for ateliers to disrupt conformist approaches to pedagogy in early childhood education and care. An illustration of the role of the atelier in amplifying the aesthetics of the experience of the educational project of Reggio Emilia illuminates how disruption of conformity can be activated through the pedagogical alliances that the atelier solicits, taking a broad view of such alliances to encompass correspondences between humans and materials. Insights are shared from a research project and installation, the "Digital Investigations Atelier," a collaboration between academic-researchers and teacher-researchers who work with young children in a variety of education and care settings in Perth, Western Australia. Data that 'glow', which for some reason, possibly intangible, stood out, are shared to illuminate conceptual phases of "aesthetics," "alliances," and "experimentation" in the creation of the installation and its opening to visitors. The article contends that conventional pedagogies, those that yearn for the predictability of recipes by the minute and elevate neoliberalism's longing for linearity, are devoid of aesthetics and experimentation, leaving little space for imagining correspondences. Instead, it is speculated that ateliers can be places of disruption, where pedagogical alliances can be re-imagined and remade through aesthetics and experimentation.

In this article, a teaching artist shares their understandings about designing a large-scale interactive intermedial arts experience for children aged five to eight years, and articulates findings about the conditions that promote quality experiences of this kind. When designing interactive arts experiences, a tension exists between providing openness and structure that derives from motivations to inspire creativity, but this does not need to be the case. Fears of constricting and stifling participants' creativity are voiced frequently. Enabling constraints are presented here as a method of promoting openness, creativity, and acts of imagination in interactive arts experiences.

This paper considers experiences of speculative immersion as artists and children map the multilayered sonic ecology of Birrarung Marr, a traditional meeting place for Aboriginal language groups of the Eastern Kulin Nation. We explore how speculative practices of immersion shaped the mapping of precolonial, contemporary, and future soundscapes of Birrarung Marr, and the ceremonial burial of these sonic cartographies for future listeners. Bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous concepts of immersion in mutually respectful and purposeful conversation, we work to re-theorise immersive experience as a process of ecological multiplicity and affective resonance, rather than one of phenomenological containment. By approaching immersion as both a concept and a sensation that ruptures the boundary between body and environment, we follow how immersion 'drifts' across porous thresholds of sensing, thinking, dreaming, making, and knowing in situated environmental education contexts. In doing so, the paper stresses the importance of speculative immersive experience in cultivating liveable urban futures under conditions of climate change, and responds to the need for new understandings of immersion that take more-than-human ecologies of experience into account.

Artistic creativity has long been associated with physical and psychological suffering. This phenomenon has also been the subject of empirical research. The anguished "artistic genius" stereotype is ubiquitous, and there is evidence to suggest that artists may have heightened susceptibility to psychopathology. The present qualitative study utilized in-depth semi-structured interviews, in accordance with the methodology of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis to explore inter-relationships between artistic creativity, and physical and mental health among 10 eminent Australian female visual artists. Results revealed complex, reciprocal interactions whereby physical and mental health impacted creativity and vice versa. Physical and psychological illnesses were found to either diminish or stimulate creativity due to the interplay of biological predispositions, personal vulnerabilities, and environmental factors. It was also revealed that immersive creative engagement could have therapeutic, cathartic effects and facilitate post-traumatic growth. The stressors and demands of professional creative practice could, however, also have a detrimental impact upon artists physically and psychologically. These findings contribute to existing understandings regarding the intricacy of the relationship between creativity, physical and psychological health. They highlight the need to challenge romantic societal mythologies regarding the impact of suffering on creativity in the visual arts and explore these issues in a nuanced manner to best support those in creative industries.

This article considers Participatory Arts and sociocultural understandings of justice and praxis through the example of Big "h"ART, an Australian multi-award winning provider where both artists and participants -- often disenfranchised and marginalised young people -- co-create the work (Matarasso, 2018). Enacting social justice principles, Big "h"ART works alongside young people to improve their life outcomes through arts practice strengthening young people's critical capabilities by inducting them as both makers and responders to their own lives and the world around them. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research across three sites in rural and regional Australia we highlight how multidimensional and multi-modal arts-based projects contribute to young people's lives through theorising the attributes and dimensions of twenty productive conditions and practices identified as essential for social change. These possibilities are important as when these conditions are purposefully enacted, the power of the arts for sense-making and identity development is revealed in non-formal learning spaces. Theoretically unpacking these conditions and practices and linking them with research outcomes helps build understanding of the generative power of Participatory Arts through the ways Big "h"ART builds bridges between young people and their communities and the developmental trajectories they may take through being 'at-promise' rather than 'at-risk'.

Projects assisting Aboriginal youth to acquire attributes for effective learning require community or elder mentoring, to ensure learning about culture and history will connect with the skills of the planned project. A Koorie art class at a secondary college in north eastern Victoria, Australia, relies on the positive attributes of mentoring in guiding young students to understand themselves as well as learn skills in Aboriginal art-making. The aim of this article is to discuss the positive attributes of the Koorie artist, since these attributes are crucial to the success of the program. A qualitative study of interviews with class teachers, a deputy principal, a Koorie artist, and students was undertaken as part of a larger project. Participants articulated the essential and positive attributes needed for a Koorie artist or mentor. This article helps understand what particular interpersonal skills, specific knowledge and applied skills are necessary for such a learning project.

A disconnect from environments has largely dominated educational discourse and policy. Attention to place and environment in education has gained momentum recently through several relational theories. Application of these theories in education notes the materiality and relationality of pedagogy, though often without specificity as to what the pedagogy is -- how it is enacted and what guides such pedagogy. For pedagogical direction in enlivening learning with environments, this paper looks to the potential of ecological psychology theories of affordances and developing specificity via perception and action with environments. To illustrate such, we offer reflections on the pedagogical gap from a teacher education project that attunes preservice teachers to the potential for learning by engaging with spaces produced for children by artists. We then look closely to the pedagogical practices of an artist working with children in a primary school maker space-oriented program. Inspired by ideas from ecological psychology, we identify four pedagogical principles in practices of responsive learning with environments and suggest these as a possible pedagogical framework for eliciting embodied, emplaced, relational, and integrated learning with environments.

The image is the raw material of the twenty-first century. Images infiltrate all social and cultural spaces. Its digital-mediated realities drive communication, industry and knowledge. Images saturate life and adolescent learners are familiar with the participatory nature of image production and its social, educational and personal communicative realities. Vision and visibility, seeing and being now dominate how we inter-subjectively recognise ourselves and perform our world. We also find our aesthetic and embodied self increasingly constituted within imaging acts that are relational. Visual culture may have colonised the self and learning, but imagination is without borders. The current pictorial turn opens possibilities to explore truth in flux through visual artistic acts. This article embeds Deleuzian method, which is one of intuitions, going beyond the actual, or our limited forms of representing life, to recognising that life has future imaginative potential forms and is always becoming. The article discusses an arts-based inquiry project for gifted artist visualiser/learners at an Australian regional university who are given broad topics on science phenomena and asked to give them expression. It suggests that pedagogies of the visual with their performative acts can prise open curriculum where an art-science interchange between two disciplines is made difficult by the current siloed nature of curriculum knowledge. Drawing on an analysis of Anika's and Joel's artworks and visual diaries it aims to reveal how their learning events dwell and are performed in aesthetic borderlands and how visual pedagogies forge new fluid visual borderlands and new learning.

The creation and maintenance of inclusive learning environments is a key responsibility of all teachers working in Australian schools. Most Australian universities embed inclusion education training for pre-service teachers (PSTs) in coursework. There is an implicit assumption in these arrangements that the study of inclusion and of special needs education completed at university will translate into practice when PSTs are working in schools. This phenomenological mixed methods research design investigated how effectively inclusion education translated into practice. The results revealed that while PSTs were aware and supportive of inclusion, no clear links were made between theory and practice.

It is generally acknowledged that alternative strategies are required to enable children with disability to access storytelling activities. In this study, we sought to analyse the benefits of one such strategy: an arts-based multisensory story and rhyme program delivered to children with Down syndrome and autism spectrum disorder. In order to determine the engagement and impact of the program on the participants, data were collected through a series of multisensory session observations, focus group interviews with parents of participants, and interviews with performing artists delivering the program. The findings of this study revealed multiple benefits of using sensory stimuli to engage children with disability in storytelling processes, including increased engagement, focus, and interaction with other children and family members. The performing artists used their knowledge and skills to create an engaging environment that was responsive to the children's needs. It was observed that language development could be further enhanced by integrating written text into the performance and increasing the use of nonverbal communication methods. Further, the engagement of siblings without disability in this program suggested that it could be developed to be inclusive of children with and without disability.

Background: Over 10 years ago, Lisa Scott first began making art at a studio in Sydney that supports people with intellectual disability to realise their creative ambitions. In this article, we consider what it has meant for Lisa to become an artist and, in the process, share the story of other big changes in her life. Methods: During audio-recorded conversations, we discussed Lisa's life story and the role of her creative practice within it. We worked together to write about some of the things we discussed. Findings: Becoming an artist has been an important transition for Lisa. With the support of staff at the studio, she has realised what she is capable of, and so have other people--from her family to complete strangers--who all value her work. Through her art, Lisa has been able to find personal relief and reflect on big changes in her life, including the loss of her mum. In a dress hand-stitched with words from her journals, she has explored another way of sharing her story. Conclusions: Art at its best forges connections between people. Lisa's art and life are evidence of this.

As an artist and writer who often works across disciplines and cultures, my education into effective and respectful engagement has been built on my experience working with First Nations friends, collaborators, and Elders. The aim of this paper is to explore teachings from a number of these leading thinkers, writers, and Elders on the topic of knowledge sharing, cross-cultural awareness, and ethical engagement through practice-led research. Drawing from personal experience, it will incorporate learnings that have informed a world view that has been evolving since childhood. The paper highlights the importance of giving rightful recognition to knowledge keepers and provides some guidance for readers interested in developing productive and respectful partnerships with First Nations collaborators. Here knowledge can be safely shared and celebrated as ways to understand the world around us that are restorative and regenerative. I speak as a woman of mixed European background raised in Australia on Gubbi Gubbi Country of South East Queensland, and Larrakia Country of Darwin. Culturally, I am descended from Norse, Celt, Saxon, and Druid ancestors. Through this lived experience I hope to share learnings that support the goals of reconciliation, truth telling, and First Nations determination in my home country, as well as facilitating greater awareness for people seeking to respectfully engage with Indigenous knowledge.

2020 has been marked by disruption on a global scale due to a range of compounding crises including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Many community arts responses to the pandemic originated from individuals rather than by means of concerted or sustained sectoral responses. This paper uses reflections from Ireland, Australia, and Mexico to discuss the precariousness and vulnerability of the community arts sector and the artists and educators within it at this profoundly difficult time. We reflect upon some of the artistic and educational innovations and experimentations that have come about. We simultaneously examine the work of artists and arts organizations on a paradigmatic level by reflecting upon the role we play in perhaps involuntarily sustaining inequalities despite articulating a desire for change in the work that we do. We argue for the community arts sector to draw upon its imagination and bravery to reflect, assume responsibility, and recast the world into what we want it to be, rather than rebuilding the old, broken one in an attempt to return to what is perceived to be normal. Finally, in turning to arts education policy, we interrogate the barriers and enablers of change in the arts in a post-COVID world, discussing the influencing policy factors of sectoral weaknesses; individual resourcefulness and resilience; the desire for revolution; and the importance of love.

This paper reports on the experiences of creative practice graduate researchers and academic staff as they seek to comply with the requirements of the Australian "National Statement on the Ethical Conduct of Research Involving Humans." The research was conducted over a two-year period (2015 to 2017) as part of a wider project 'iDARE -- Developing New Approaches to Ethics and Research Integrity Training through Challenges Presented by Creative Practice Research'. The research identified the appreciation of ethics that the participants acquired through their experience of institutional research ethics procedures at their university. It also revealed a disjunction between the concepts of ethics acquired through meeting institutional research ethics requirements, the notion of ethics that many researchers adopt in their own professional creative practice and the contents of professional codes of conduct. A key finding of the research was that to prepare creative practice graduates for ethical decision-making in their professional lives, research ethics training in universities should be broadened to encompass a variety of contexts and enable researchers to develop skills in ethical know-how.

In "Arts Nation" 2015, the Australia Council documented the current landscape of artistic endeavour in Australia, acknowledging that there are still gaps that need to be filled to build a greater public understanding of the arts in Australia. The contribution of Australian universities to the arts is one such lacuna. This paper seeks to expand this understanding by considering the contribution that the university sector makes to visual and performing arts outside its traditional teaching role. It draws upon data contained in university websites and through interviews with practising artists employed as academic staff in three case study universities. It explores how and why these contributions remain largely hidden in reports on artistic endeavour and concludes by suggesting that a greater recognition of the role that universities play in Australia's "Arts Nation" will deliver benefits to artists, audiences and to Australia's artistic and cultural heritage.

Professional dance careers require years of intensive training. Stress experienced during training must be balanced with adequate recovery to prevent overtraining and burnout. Little is known, however, about how dancers achieve recovery-stress balance. This study examined dancers' recollection of stress and recovery during their vocational dance training to identify potential stressors and recovery behaviors in vocational dance training. Twelve current and ex-professional ballet (n=4) and contemporary dancers (n=8) participated in the study. Four general dimensions, based on the extant overtraining literature in athletes, were identified: dance culture, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and situational factors. Cultural norms, health factors related to injury and illness, and transition periods within vocational dance training were sources of stress for participants. Dancers' responses to stress were categorized as adaptive or maladaptive. Maladaptive behavioral responses (e.g., ignoring injury, pain, and fatigue) were related to negative training outcomes associated with overtraining and burnout. Interventions that encourage adaptive behaviors for dance students to support health and well-being are recommended to address the recovery-stress balance in vocational dance training identified in this study.

This article describes the needs analysis, implementation and outcomes of a pilot program aimed at creating books with families in ways that represent their language and culture. "Creating Books in Communities" is part of "Better Beginnings," a state-wide program, developed by the State Library of Western Australia, for children and their families, that aims to develop literacy skills through fostering a love of books and language. Literature about the importance of recognising and valuing home languages and culture in supporting early literacy learning and the impact of family literacy programs is explored to provide a background to the program. The process of "Creating Books in Communities" is described in detail--it involves collaboration between librarians, early childhood partners, and community based artists working with families to produce a high-quality book. The impact of the program is explored through the voices of all the participants, revealing a number of positive family and community outcomes. We conclude the article by identifying six key factors related to the success of the program, which can be used as guidelines for implementation of the program both nationally and internationally.

This paper explores how aligned arts and play experiences can extend child and family engagement in a public outdoor space. The importance of outdoor play for children is strongly advocated and in response local governments provide playgrounds and recreational open spaces. To extend further the experiences afforded in such spaces some local governments now employ "play workers," whose role is to prompt exploration and facilitate connections. With the intention of animating an uninviting and underused outdoor public space, the ArtPlay Backyard program presented a series of artist-facilitated experiences that encouraged children and families to explore, interact and transform. Research into this program, undertaken through observations and in-situ interviews, mapped the views and actions of children, parents, early childhood professionals and artists. The study concluded that the program was highly engaging to families who were animated by "artful play": experiences guided by artists, who, acting like "play workers," stimulated imaginative, aesthetic, creative and social encounters with people, place, and materials.

This article reflects on ongoing research-led teaching in the area of creative industries in higher education. Specifically it reports on key work-integrated learning strategies designed to better prepare graduates for the employment sector. The creative industries sector is complex and competitive, characterized by non-linear career paths driven by the individual. Following contextualization of the key issues, a core creative industries subject and curriculum is described, which requires students to engage directly with industry practitioners via internships or case studies. In order to interrogate the impact of these activities, a sample of final reflections as well as formal student feedback on the subject were analyzed in order to draw out key themes in relation to student learning and understanding. Analysis of these data propose that direct engagement with practitioners assists students in developing new knowledge of the capacities they will require for a sustainable career. [Papers included in this "Asia-Pacific Journal of Cooperative Education" ("APJCE") Special Issue stem from selected manuscripts from the 2014 Australian Collaborative Education Network (ACEN) Conference Proceedings.]

In 2008, the Australian Government established the Artist-in-Residence (AiR) program as a four-year $5.2m initiative to improve young people's access to quality arts education. Managed by State and Territory Government Education and Arts Departments, the program funded professional artists-in-residence in schools, early childhood centres and universities for a minimum of one month. One of the core principles of the program, which made it distinct from other programs for arts in schools in Australia, was that artists and educators were to work in collaborative partnership in the AiR projects to support teacher professional learning. Context-based and collaborative professional learning strategies have been identified as offering the possibility for "immersive" experiences and exemplars that can be applied later in teachers' own classrooms (Burridge & Carpenter, 2013). It was anticipated that partnering with artists would benefit teachers of all levels of experience and proficiency in teaching about the arts and through the arts, including those teachers with no arts experience at all. The AiR program was implemented at a time of significant reform in Australian education, including the development of the country's first national curriculum, and the renewal of a creativity agenda for Australian schools. The study presented here links the AiR program to this creativity agenda through an investigation of teachers' perceptions of the impact of the program on their own professional learning. In particular, the authors were interested in discovering how teachers used discourses of creativity and inferences about creative learning to articulate the value of the program. Using a working definition of creative learning as both teaching creatively and teaching for creativity (Sefton-Green, Thomson, Jones, & Bresler, 2011, pp. 1-2), their initial aim was to gain insight into how partnership programs such as AiR enabled teachers to generate "creative capital" (Fisher, 2004, p. 14) through engagement with both arts content and pedagogy. This raised questions, however, about the capacity, nature and distribution of that capital to effect sustainable change in teacher practice. In this article, the authors therefore consider the study's findings in the light of alternatively theorised perspectives on contemporary teacher professional learning in creative education (Hatcher, 2011) beyond the acquisition of arts-based skills and knowledge.

This article discusses the use of beta-blockers by performing artists, the reasons why they are taken, and the potential associated risks. We argue that there are high levels of usage within sectors of the professional performing arts community and that there may be high levels of risk in using these medications, particularly without medical supervision. Previous studies have mentioned potential risks, but this article will be the first to analyse the potential negative impact of side effects from these medications upon specific aspects of instrumental playing.

The 'responding' strand of the Australian visual arts curriculum promotes twenty-first century learning skills through students' analytical engagement with artworks and artists. Assessing students' experiences and engagement is one strategy to improve teaching and learning in responding. However, there are no validated, subject-specific student engagement instruments for teachers to use. This study sought to develop a student self-report diagnostic instrument that provides information on past experiences with visual arts and factors affecting both cognitive and psychological engagement, with implications for improving teaching and learning. The instrument was piloted with 266 Year 10 to 12 students, as responding has an approximate 50% assessment weighting in the Australian visual arts course for senior school students. This paper reports on the exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses conducted in the development of the instrument. It adds to the body of knowledge on developing engagement instruments, recognising that student engagement in secondary education is context-dependent.

Building a sustainable career in the creative industries is a challenging proposition. Creative workers face high levels of employment insecurity and limited career development opportunity. Those working in the sector must build discipline-oriented career self-management skills, while also finding ways to cope with the psychologically demanding nature of precarious work. Two competencies that contribute to creative career success are self-efficacy and career optimism, both of which support resilience and persistence in the face of career obstacles. This study used narrative data from 28 interviews across six creative disciplines to examine how creative workers who work within communities of practice build self-efficacy and career optimism. The findings suggested that, by participating in communities of practice, creative practitioners not only build professional skills that align with their discipline but also gain psychosocial support that promotes resilience. There is an opportunity, therefore, to enhance understanding of communities of practice with creative career development offerings.

This article discusses how a New South Wales (NSW), Australia, visual arts educator, Diane, and her 10th-grade students used art practice as research and visual process diaries to create mini bodies of work. According to Marshall and D'Adamo (2011), art practice as research stresses conceptual and technical skills, uses artwork for interdisciplinary inquiry, is student-driven yet educator guided, and employs concepts that connect to multiple academic fields. Art practice as research acknowledges the creative process as an integral part of artmaking practice; it invites art educators to consider providing students with an ability to articulate creative practice in explicit and knowledgeable ways (Marshall, 2015). It allows students to understand their artmaking processes, how they acquire knowledge, and how to articulate their own belief systems about artmaking, as derived from the synthesis of information (intellectual, emotional, and personal) from their world. The author found that visual process diaries, bodies of work, and art practice as research can serve as exciting and viable models for U.S. art education practice. By investigating and emulating artists' practices and ideas and by metacognitively reflecting on and communicating their own through process diaries and bodies of work, students can use art practice as research to interconnect ideas, link them to their own experiences and the world, and see artmaking as a way of thinking and knowing. Art practice as research helps students to understand their experiences in new ways as they investigate, creatively interpret, and become aware of their thinking.

This is a co-constructed narrative between both Marie, an early career teacher, Stephen an artist and colleague in the school's creative arts faculty and Colin, an Aboriginal teacher and researcher. They met throughout 2012 and discussed issues that related to their discursive interactions that occurred in this small rural school between its teachers and the town's largely Aboriginal community. These discussions were conducted within the context, of Marie's experiences as a new scheme teacher, Stephen's reflexive observations as a teacher of many years' experience and Colin, who had worked with the school on various curriculum projects. These narratives give witness to their experiences, their failures and successes and of the discursive concerns seen to affect school student success and community relationships. These narratives connect with the town's history of race relations and the aspirations and concerns of Aboriginal people living in this community. This paper, which focuses on Marie's efforts to engage her Year 8 music students in the new and 'alien' environment is juxtaposed with Stephen's, whose commentary, based on proximity and practice, gives a counter insight into the world of teaching. This paper is a three-way critical reflection on the place of contested and conflicted relationships between teachers and students, the impact of teachers' limited appreciation of the histories of this community and its impact on their lives.

This international study investigated the experiences and attitudes of teaching artists whose work is rooted in theatre, dance, and closely-related disciplines. Based on survey data from teaching artists working in Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, United Kingdom, and the United States (n = 172), the paper illuminates participants' perspectives on preparation, practice and professional identity. Emergent themes include: (1) teaching artist training and preparation, (2) work contexts and populations served, and (3) work challenges and obstacles. Following discussion of key survey findings, three case studies based in higher education settings in the USA, UK and Southeast Asia are presented. Hagman's (2005) framework for multiple fields of subjectivity at work in aesthetic experience is employed to illustrate the ways in which the intrasubjective, the intersubjective, and the metasubjective fields of subjectivity inform each teaching artist's practice and professional identity. The paper concludes with an analysis of themes in light of current discussions on reflective practice and implications for teaching artist "praxis". (Contains 7 footnotes.)

The City of Melbourne's ArtPlay is open to children and young people aged 3-13 years, and provides a wide range of artist-led programs that serve a broad community within and outside the municipality. Its sister facility, Signal, caters for young people 13-22 years. An Australia Council of the Arts funded Creative Community Partnership Initiative, the "ACCESS Program," implemented at ArtPlay and Signal, involved diverse groups of children, families and young people in four artist-led projects. The projects were assessed using a researcher developed creative and community development evaluation framework. This article reports on one of these projects, City Beats, which involved a partnership between the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and ArtPlay. (Contains 3 figures and 5 footnotes.)

This paper reports findings from interviews with fourteen Australian artist academics, who discuss the complex relationships between their Arts practice, their Research and their Teaching. We refer to this as the ART nexus because of the strong flow of information reported between these three activities. However, this information flow is not achieved without conflict. Conflict arises over the balance of time available and different mindsets required for differing activities, and there can be hesitation about analysing intuitive creative thought. The findings reveal ways in which information is "translated" for different audiences including undergraduate and postgraduate students, who are both recipients of and contributors to the nexus. The article problematises the ART nexus in an attempt to offer greater insight into the ways in which individual artist academics teach through their arts practice and their research, within a university system that struggles to accommodate this breadth of endeavour. (Contains 2 tables.)

Despite the recent focus on creativity and innovation as the backbone of Western knowledge economies, the presence of the creative arts within universities remains problematic. Australian artist academics who seek a balance between their artistic and academic lives work within a government-directed research environment that is unable to quantify; therefore, to recognize the value of creative research, yet which accepts the funded outcomes of post-graduate practice-based students. This study sought to unravel how artist academics from a variety of non-written creative disciplines perceive the relationships between their roles as artists, researchers and tertiary educators. Three themes were generated from interviews with the artist-academics: (a) creative research and the academy, (b) practice, research, and teaching nexus, and (c) identity. Central to the discussions was the question of whether and how creative work constitutes legitimate research. (Contains 1 table and 1 footnote.)

Cinema is an art form widely recognised as an agent to change the social condition and alter traditional norms. Movies can be used to educate and transform society's collective conscience. Indigenous Australian artists utilise the power of artistic expression as a tool to initiate change in the attitudes and perceptions of the broader Australian society. Australia's story has predominately been told from the coloniser's viewpoint. This narrative is being rewritten through Indigenous artists utilising the power of cinema to create compelling stories with Indigenous control. This medium has come into prominence for Indigenous Australians to express our culture, ontology and politics. Movies such as "Samson and Delilah", "Bran Nue Dae", "The Sapphires" and "Rabbit-Proof Fence" for example, have highlighted the injustices of past policies, adding new dimensions to the Australian narrative. These three films are just a few of the Indigenous Australian produced films being used in the Australian National Curriculum. Through this medium, Australian Indigenous voices are rewriting the Australian narrative from the Indigenous perspective, deconstructing the predominant stereotypical perceptions of Indigenous culture and reframing the Australian story. Films are essential educational tools to cross the cultural space that often separates Indigenous learners from their non-Indigenous counterparts.

This paper explores the lives of three New South Wales Aboriginal women, mothers, artists and academics. It will identify the women's success in academia as demonstrated by their pathways to education, employment, job satisfaction, commitment and leadership experiences. In addition, the challenges they have faced, together with balancing family and community commitments and the importance and influence of mentors who assisted them on their pathway to success will be discussed. They employ Aboriginal methodologies that privilege Aboriginal ways of being, knowing and doing utilising a yarning methodology which is a culturally appropriate conversational process of sharing stories to develop knowledge and educate younger generations. In this way, they generate new knowledge on what works and why for Aboriginal women in academia, identifying historical pathways and platforms to success, revealing common significant influences in order to uncover key drivers of success and aspects of cultural and social life, which have enabled them as Aboriginal women to succeed.

This study draws on student engagement factors to examine the relationship between students' non-school-based arts experiences on their intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy to participate in visual arts responding tasks. Visual arts responding in the curriculum includes learning about artists and artworks, decoding art and making critical judgements, and is important in building twenty-first century learning skills such as critical thinking and communication. A total of 266 Year 10 to 12 students from 18 schools in Western Australia (WA) participated in the quantitative research, which explored outside-school arts engagement as well as cognitive and psychological engagement factors in their current year of secondary schooling. The findings showed that while being an art consumer appears to impact on intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy, producing art as a hobby outside of school does not appear to do so. The research raised questions about links between practice and theory, and how to promote students' engagement in responding.

In the changing context of universities, organisational structures for teaching and research problematise academic roles. This paper draws on a critical realist analysis of surveys and interviews with academics from universities in England and Australia. It identifies important academic work, not captured simply in descriptions of teaching or research. It shows that many academics, who are not research high flyers nor award-winning teachers, carry out this essential work which contributes to the effective functioning of their universities. That work is referred to as academic artisanal work and the people who do it as academic artisans. Characteristics and examples of academic artisans are presented, and the nature of artisanal work is explored. Implications for higher education management and for future studies are discussed. The paper points to an urgent need to better understand the complex nature of academic work.

Four young Australian children participated in research in which they shared their photographs and narratives of art experiences in their homes, early childhood centre and school. Drawing on Dewey's theories on art as experience, this article analyses some of the ways these 4- and 5-year-old children enjoyed satisfying art experiences, primarily in their homes, that moved them beyond mere recognition of their physical and graphic worlds to deeper perceptions that connected ideas, emotions, art media and people. Acknowledging and responding to children's perspectives on art experiences prompts pedagogical recommendations including provision of art experiences around children's personally relevant inquiries; introducing new stimuli that build rather than disrupt their explorations; providing children with a sense of purpose and audience for their art and supporting children's agency with regards to accessing art materials and ongoing projects. How structured time promotes or constrains perceptive and satisfying art experiences warrants consideration, as does the promotion of supportive and responsive interpersonal relationships between children and adults.

This article looks to three inspirational Black women, bell hooks, Stacey McBride-Irby and Patricia Williams, in the pursuit of radical curriculum. While today curriculum is critiqued as racialised, gendered, sexualised and classed, the formats of curriculum documents such as text books, units of work and lesson plans have changed little. These documents are often conceived as linear sequences of steps leading to outcomes, and their voices are distanced and "neutral." Drawing on a doctoral study of curriculum design in Australia, this article embraces a different approach by opening up a unit of work on girls' popular culture to hooks' invocations to teach to transgress, so that curriculum might be experienced as colour and curves, rather than a monochrome route to a pre-determined end point. Through this, along with hooks, I invite teachers to live pedagogy, rather than to deliver it.

This article takes as a starting point the career of Sir Alec Clegg, Chief Education Officer for the West Riding of Yorkshire (1945-1974), and traces his professional connections with educationists in Australia and New Zealand. In exploring the nature of global exchanges between educators, artists, architects and designers in the decades immediately before and after the Second World War, the intertwining of modernism and progressivism is critically explored in the wider contextual frame of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The notion of increasing the humanity of the classroom occupied the efforts of a constellation of individuals caught up in the desire to redesign schooling in ways that would regenerate democratic relations of living in the post-war world. It is suggested that a common thread connected those concerned to strengthen democracy through combining progressive and modernist attitudes with the potent legacy of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Professional development for those pursuing a career in creative industries is typically driven by individual practitioners, given most areas (e.g. photography, design, film) do not require membership with a regulatory organisation or evidence of continuing skills development. For those based regionally, opportunities for professional development are also less available than for those in capital cities. This paper reports on the findings of a survey (N = 151) and follow-up interviews (N = 29) with current creative industries practitioners in the regional city of Townsville in northern Australia, in relation to professional development opportunities and issues faced as a result of being located a substantial distance from the nearest capital city. The findings reveal a range of key challenges for regional practitioners due to distance and access to specialists in the field, yet at the same time a number of opportunities for those who display human agency and who are agentic learners.

Recent research on practice-based doctorates in Australia has revealed an institutional preference for "theorised" research approaches aimed at situating studies of practice within established academic paradigms. In this article we examine how the aim of communicating with artistic peers steers the research design and the production of text-based artefacts for a group of practice-based doctoral students working on jazz topics (n = 11) away from theorised approaches and towards what is commonly referred to as a "commentary" approach. This finding reveals the extent to which the values of an artistic community can influence the scope of what is discussed within practice-based doctorates and highlights the need for ongoing discussion related to how such values might best interface with what institutions view as best-practice research frameworks.

We examine in this article how the construction of a metaphor for collaborative practice can be used as a navigational tool to assist teachers in making meaningful connections between artists and teaching practices. Exploring collaboration in practice as a metaphor can help teachers expand their problem-solving capacities and allow them to cultivate authentic interaction between their artmaking and teaching practices. We also illustrate how collaborative practices, when enacted in both teaching and artmaking and conceived as a metaphorical construct can guide teachers toward identifying synergies between their artmaking and art teaching. To achieve this, we have drawn together a hybridized qualitative methodology to generate a multimodal rendering of intricately layered stories toward cultivating the inter-relationship between artist and teacher.

Despite the well-documented challenges that artists face in developing and sustaining a viable career, there is ongoing interest and enrolment in higher education programmes in the creative and performing arts. At the same time, extant research demonstrates that a higher education degree does not necessarily lead to enhanced career success for graduates of these programmes. Hence, this paper explores survey data from 120 creative and performing arts students at a regional Australian higher education institution, in terms of their motivation to study at this level and to pursue a career as an artist. The findings reveal various insights into the factors that motivate this group of students, as well as issues of wider relevance to providers of higher education programmes in the creative and performing arts.

A key goal of Biosphere Reserves (BR) is to foster environmental education for sustainable development. In this study we systematically analyse two cases in which environmental art is used as a mechanism to engage communities in "building environmental understanding", in Noosa BR in Australia and North Devon BR in the United Kingdom. Data were derived through document analyses, site visits, questionnaires and semi-structured interviews conducted with the audience, artists, and residents. The study concludes that environmental art can build understanding through (1) exchanging ideas and providing dialogue (2) building a sense of place (3) clarifying and enhancing the understanding of information and issues, and (4) generating concern. Consequently environmental art should be considered an innovative addition to the suite of environmental education tools used in other BRs and community organisations that aim to educate about the environment.